Finnish software house Digia is to acquire the Qt open source user interface software technology and business from Nokia to bring it back to the embedded space.

Qt has been used by over 450,000 developers and thousands of leading companies worldwide in over 70 industries to power the most innovative, mission-critical and renowned applications and UIs. Qt Commercial is a leader in a number key market segments including automotive, medical, advanced visualization & animation, industrial automation and aerospace & defense. In the future, Digia expects that Qt will have a key role bringing world-class user experience and user interfaces to embedded systems and consumer electronics.
As part of the transaction, a maximum of 125 Qt people from Nokia will transfer to Digia, mostly based in Oslo, Norway and Berlin, Germany. “We are looking forward to welcoming the Qt team to Digia. By adding this world class organization to our existing team we plan to build the next generation leading cross-platform development environment.” said Tommi Laitinen, SVP, International Products, Digia. “Now is a good time for everyone to revisit their perception of Qt. Digia’s targeted R&D investments will bring back focus on Qt’s desktop and embedded platform support, while widening the support for mobile operating systems.”
Following the acquisition Digia becomes responsible for all the Qt activities formerly carried out by Nokia. These include product development, as well as the commercial and open source licensing and service business. Following the acquisition, Digia plans to quickly enable Qt on Android, iOS and Windows 8 platforms.
One of Digia’s key objectives with this acquisition is to improve its position within the Qt ecosystem by further strengthening Qt’s R&D capabilities and expanding its reach on many more platforms. Digia acquired the Qt Commercial licensing business from Nokia in March 2011 and forecasts the acquisition’s impact on its 2012 revenues to be positive.
Digia will work with ecosystem members to secure a successful release of Qt5 and is committed to continuing the Qt Project in order to maintain Qt’s availability under both open source and commercial licenses.
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